It Does Matter! or, They Do Matter: Confluence of Multiple Literacies and a Theory for Navigation within/between Them

            Joe and I created our schema after discussing our interpretations of the readings. We went through several iterations before arriving at the final model. In order to consider how the different literacy theories that we read for this week would fit into the model, we first discussed several intertextual relationships in our discussion. After recreating the schema several times (i.e., using a whiteboard in the Johnston building’s Digital Studio) and arriving at our final model, we sought to locate the theorists in the schema, deemed them to be present, and so we proceeded to build the model using a free online service called Canva. I will briefly discuss some of the more salient connections as I describe the schema in this post. First, to provide some impression of the evolution of the schema, I would like to emphasize that one common thread or element within our different models was the relationship between the dominant literacy ideology--the capital “L” Literacy--and the myriad language communities that use language variants of the dominant language complex and thus have local literacy ideologies. This relationship is still at the center of our final model. The language communities, which may be bound together by language practices, can be variously defined, and so we imagined a nearly infinite number of language communities existing subordinately to the dominant language ideology. In our model, the relationship between the dominant literacy and the many community literacies is represented by the large arrow that passes temporally through all community spheres. This temporal element was heavily informed both by Brandt’s notion of the piling up or accumulation of literacy practices and also Johnson-Eilola’s discussion of the hypertextual or intertextual relationships within texts as products. Within the schema, this simple two dimensional image belies a complex four dimensional relationship. That is, the dominant literacy ideology flows through the many communities across time, encapsulating the ideological shifts in the dominant and community literacies. The community literacies include speech, writing and reading, as well as other literate behaviors or practices. Beside the series of green circles representing a language community’s core literacy ideology across time, there is another group overlapping circles that represent the overlapping spheres of different language communities. Of course, there can be overlap between multiple language communities, in terms of the experiences of a single individual or group or individuals. There can also be communities that do not overlap with other communities. While it might be difficult in the real world to identify communities that share no overlap with other communities in terms of the characteristics of the language users within the communities, we allowed for such mutual exclusivity in our model because then such communities could interact and share literacy practices within contact zones. Over time, such contact zones could conceivably bring the communities together inexorably in terms of shared language features and literacy ideologies. Contact zones also occur between individual language communities and the interaction between other community ideologies with the dominant ideology.

            Now, to move back or up (i.e., within the related concepts in the schema, towards the top of the image) we envisioned that the large arrow flowing from the dominant Literacy ideologies would contain the interaction between dominant and community literacies in the form of normative socialization such as schooling, professional development, etc. As communities undergo socialization, some dominant literacy practices may be retained and some language practices associated with the language communities can interact or push back against the dominant literacy as described by Richardson. We did not have the space in the image to depict the arrows that move in the opposite direction to the other errors, emanating from the communities towards the dominant ideology. According to Richardson, and as we intended to be implicit in our schema, the local literacy ideologies can impact the dominant ideology, but the disparity in force or influence might always be imbalanced in favor of the dominant ideology. Such bidirectionality happens in the interaction space of our schema, but also, perhaps more effectively, in the space for negotiation depicted near the bottom of the image where many of the arrows converge. One critical assumption on our part affects interpretation of the negotiation that occurs because of the many points of contact between/within communities and the dominant Literacy ideology. We assumed that this negotiation space could navigated by individuals who are deemed successful in that they have agency from navigating multiple ideologies. Success is defined in terms of being literate within a community according to the local normative standards that define that ideology, AND the ability to critically interact with or within the dominant Literacy ideology. In Bizzell’s terms, these individuals would have the rhetorical ability to understand multiple audiences, with critical insights that come from the awareness of the power imbalance between the dominant ideology and the myriad local ideologies. Our negotiation space describes an ideal form of the possibilities for negotiation, where success and agency are complex terms that are determined in part by those competing ideologies. A specific literate individual would likely be literate within his or her own language community and as a result capable of pursuing literacy in other communities or by performing the literate practices sanctioned by the dominant ideology. We speculated that the “successful” navigation of the negotiation space, which is a confluence of contact zones, might be apparent in such an individual’s composition of texts in the form of agency.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-53.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57 (1995): 649-68.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.17-33. Rptd. in Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.

Richardson, Elaine. “‘English-Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition, eds. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 97-112.

Literacy: Schematizing the Conversation

Sometimes in group projects, people have largely the same vision and understanding for the end product. Sometimes they're wildly different, and major compromises take place. Both of those models of group work are fairly static, however, and when Tyreek and I worked together this week, our collaboration instead slowly shifted the ways I was thinking about the readings as a whole.

Our prezi presents literacy by schematizing the conversations of literacy; linking together the theorists for this week in a model that connects ideas of what literacy is with images of what it is not, placing influences, arguments, and outcomes into a model that emphasizes the key ideas of this turn.

As I read the articles for this week, before meeting with Tyreek, the mental structure I created of literacy was one model, an attempt to create a coherent, whole image of literacy as defined by our authors that accounted for their nuances. I vaguely imagined situating "literacy" situated within ideas of social context, drawing from Johnson-Eilola's emphasis on the connections arising from texts and Brandt's theory of literacy as accumulation, spreading back and forth across generations (659), across learning contexts (666), and throughout everyday life (653). Leading into that from the left would be the "legacies" of literacy (Ohman 677)--economic domination (Ohman 677), the various literacy theories Bizzell identifies, Brandt's various transformations throughout history (654), and so on. Some aspects of our schema do evidence traces of my early thought process, particularly the four circles of influence we identify, which represent patterns of thought shared by our authors as they examine the various forces and realities bound up inextricably with ideas of literacy.

As we began to create the map, we added ideas from our authors. We populated the giant circle of context with the voices and ideas the articles from this week were speaking back to, arguing with, drawing from, and complicating. We extended out beyond the circle the ways the authors envisioned their perspectives on literacy applying in the classrooms. And we created a circle to identify what literacy is/should be, according to our authors.

In creating and going back over our schema, I realized that it had become something different than what I imagined back when I was reading. Because of all the history, tensions, and traces our authors identify, to create a coherent idea of literacy, no matter how nuanced, would end up flattening and hiding aspects that these authors wanted to highlight, such as the aspects of identity and ways of knowing (Richardson 100), the dynamic standards and connotations of literacy (Brandt 654), and particularly the rhetoricity and audience-situated-ness of these debates (Bizzell 150). By conceptualizing literacy the way we did, and by populating our circles with ideas from various authors rather than synthesizing one coherent definition of literacy or pedagogical ideal, our schema represents the multi-voiced conversation, with its various priorities, perspectives, and individual arguments. Literacy, as a concept and practice, resides in the various voices making it up.

Works cited: 
Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-153.
Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sidler, Michelle, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.
Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985):675-688.
Richardson, Elaine. “’English Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Eds. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Southern Illinois Press, 2010. 97-110.

Literacy Seen (Anew?): Navigation and Negotiation

In our construction of a schema of literacy, Anna and I looked to bring our authors not only into conversation with one another, but also into conversation with those speaking on the subject of literacy and looking to navigate and negotiate the same channels they were/are. We first sought to examine the correlations of our authors and offer several key concepts or nodes that we believed could organize our authors' assertions and overall contributions to the discussion of literacy. In order to create these nodes, Anna and I discussed some of the key congruities that we found within our authors' texts, settling on four in particular. These four organizational concepts were not created with the intention of becoming concrete and non-negotiable points of reference to examine the discussions being held about literacy, but we believed that they were sufficient starting points to serve as an inlet into the conversation. For us, in our authors' discussions of literacy, we believed that our authors situated their concepts and assertions about literacy particularly in these four ways: in matters of accumulation, discussions of power or power relationships, economics (influenced by or from), and when speaking about culture.

For matter of accumulation, we first looked to Brandt, who offered the theory explicitly.  For Brandt, one accumulated literacy by way of piling up and spreading out. Brandt asserted that literacy could be influenced by previous generations, from the home, from early education environments, and residual materials (652; 659; 664; 665; 666). Literacy also was spread out in that it must be used to navigate various channels throughout one's life (653). Richardson, while not explicitly mentioning accumulation theory, made several assertions that could fall under the theory. In her advocation to include the contributions made by African American authors and offering insight to students the examples of literacy acquisition and literacy practice, Richardson may be giving a practical application of Brandt's theory of accumulation. Most of our theorists situated or discussed literacy in terms of power or power relationships. Ohman examined the usage of literacy as a way to "keep the lower orders docile," and what he saw as an "inextricable part" of social and class relations (677; 687). Bizell acknowledged the power of literacy in her own conception of the composition classroom. Even in a classroom where literacy in constantly negotiated by professor and student, the professor has unequal power inherently by the position they hold (150). Richardson explicitly states that language serves as "medium for power and control" (99). Literacy is, for some of our authors, is almost inevitably shares some relationship with economics. Ohman believes that literacy has been used to measure quantities and modify people, and that computer literacy can be utilized to separate the elite from the poor because it can be used to "expand the minds and the freedom of the elite meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce" (683). Johnson-Eilola says that the process movement reshaped how we understand writing and helped us include production and power structures (457). The most prevalent construct that is utilized as grounding for our authors' arguments is the power of culture and its connectedness to literacy. Richardson asserts that language learning should build on the vernacular strategies of students and their ways of displaying knowledge and the historical or philosophical underpinnings of that knowledge, something that is overtly culture based (104). Bizzel includes cultural literacy to ground her theories and suggest that students have their own valid literacies that they bring into the classroom. Because of the prevalence of these grounding concepts, we felt that they were very sufficient for our organization and schematizing of literacy.

While these were settled on by our discussions about our authors, we do not believe that these are the only ways in which to situate or ground discussions of literacy. It is for this reason that we looked to include in our schema the conversations held about literacy at large. For Anna and I, we believed it to be key the matters, assertions, conversations, beliefs, and/or contributions made by other theorists and participants in the discourse about literacy in order for a more thorough examination of our authors' own contributions. In order to understand our authors' texts more thoroughly, we needed to examine the discourse community at large. We looked to identify both who and what our authors were engaging with in their texts. This helped us to better navigate the contours of this discussion in order to build a more nuanced schema. For Bizzel, "foundationalist" arguments that sought to to draw attention away from the social class basis of academic literacy were problematic (142). Bizzel took issue with the assumptions of the Great Cognitive Divid theory and looked to find a more useful way to examine literacy acquisition. From Walter Ong's offering of a theory that posited technology's ability to enable men to communicate knowledge in all new ways, Ohman found an excellent point for extension (681). Richardson looked to combat the ways of thinking about literacy constituted by English-Only and grounded her theory in what seemed to be identity politics. For us, in order to properly assess our authors' contributions, we felt it necessary to examine the conversations that may have influenced or help guide them to their theories and assertions.

From an examination of these conversations, we were able to better conceptualize and make sense of our authors' own assertions. By making sense of the surrounding conversations, we felt we were able to better understand both our authors' own assertions and what they believed could be brought into practice and what that practice may look like in the classroom. In order to schematize literacy, we needed to examine the discourse about literacy from the outside in. It is from this examination that were able to construct our schema in the way that we did.


Works Cited:

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-153.
Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the TwentiethCentury.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection inComposition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sidler, Michelle, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.
Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985):675-688.
Richardson, Elaine. “’English Only,’ African American Contributions to StandardizedCommunication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Eds. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Southern Illinois Press, 2010. 97-110. 

A Moving Monolithic Target

 Building on Julianna’s blog post, I’ll continue with some commentary about trying to take on the “monolith” of literacy in a visual form. One of the first challenges we experienced was choosing a tool to express our ideas visually. Our own “literacy” of these visual tools came into play when we were designing the schema. PowerPoint was too difficult. Traditional paper methods would take to long to utilize and wouldn’t translate well to the screen. Additionally, the software Charise and I used last time “MindNode Lite” wouldn’t allow a user to connect two nodes together. We used a free online flowchart application called Draw.io to create the “map” as the the program balances the technical ability we have with our need to create a legible and screen worthy schema.

Our Literacy Schema

On the map, there are four “bubbles” or sub-fields of literacy designated by the purple squares. The four sub-fields are: Cultural Literacies, Academic Literacies, Cognitive Literacies and the bubble we had the most trouble articulating—Literacies, Technology & Materiality. Branching off of each sub-field, this week’s readings are designated in green hexagons. Additional scholars that we think are relevant to each sub-field of literacy studies are marked with orange trapezoids.

The bubble that we had the most trouble articulating was Literacies, Technology & Materiality. We created this bubble to encompass the material aspects of literacy that Ohmann refers to, but also to capture connections to mastery of objects or technologies that Ohmann and Johnson-Eilola explores. In doing this, we also wanted to connect these authors to current scholarship in regards to technology, literacy, and multimodal composition from scholars like Kathleen Yancey, Walter Ong, and the New London Group, thereby also incorporating aspects like visual literacy. One thing we struggled with was the difference between thinking of technology in material terms and in thinking about technology in a broader sense—the idea that writing is technology—because the broader sense of technology would encompass all of the authors in our schema.

A key decision we made was to pluralize the word “literacies” in all of the sub-fields, as we felt that all the authors presented a multiple and nuanced view of literacy.

The author we had the most difficulty placing was Johndan Johnson-Eilola, who presented a theory of text as related to composition studies. Johnson-Eilola’s doesn’t connect his theories to literacy in the course of her article, but his argument about a pedagogy of connection and collaboration in place of single texts and single authors implies a need for multiple literacies. His use of hypertext as an example made a connection to technology palpable. We had originally placed Johnson-Eilola between Cognitive Literacies and Literacies, Technology & Materiality, because his argument is more pedagogical, but the more we thought about it, we decided that Johnson-Eilola was arguing for a cultural shift in the way that we view text and subjectivity, so we moved him between cultural and technological literacies.

In making our schema, I kept getting the nagging sensation that there were connections we weren’t making. I imagined a three-dimensional and much more complex web (a possible flattening inherent in visual representation?). More possibilities for connection could easily be evidenced by our struggles with the Literacies, Technology & Materiality bubble. For example, Ohmann could also be connected to issues of Academic Literacies when he notes, “This age of technology, this age of computers, will change very little in social relations—the class relations—of which literacy is an inextricable part” (687). Issues of academic literacies often revolve around closing gaps in education between wealthy and poor students, and a student’s ability to be literate in the ways of the academy are at the heart of that challenge. In addressing desires by educators to give poorer students the literacy skills necessary to perform in the academy, I also would theorize that the authors grouped around Cognitive literacies could all be connected to Academic Literacies as well.  

Deborah Brandt’s comments about the fluctuating nature of literacy give insight into the difficulty of pinning down the term literacy. Brandt states, “Important too is the realization that the history of literacy at any moment is always carrying along a complex, sometimes cacophonous mix of fading and ascending materials, practices, and ideologies. Literacy is always in flux” (666). In order to understand what it means to be literate, we always have to be checking in with ourselves, our field, our cultural context and with our available materials. Literacy is a moving target.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-153.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth

Century.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in

Composition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sidler, Michelle, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985):

675-688.

Richardson, Elaine. “’English Only,’ African American Contributions to Standardized

Communication Structures, and the Potential for Social Transformation.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Eds. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Southern Illinois Press, 2010. 97-110. 

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Attacking this project, schematizing literacy, forced Mandy and I to work through the complexities of this term so that we could represent it as a multidimensional entity. Starting the readings this week, it was no secret to me the massiveness and nuances of literacy. Below I've shared a brief story how literacy is represented in some K-12 classrooms that you might find interesting. Reading the articles this week echoed a question that Dr. Graban asked in class on Tuesday and reminded me of an old-time show, whose line is it anyway? Rather, who determines what literacy is and how we should come to it? Then, how do we do “it” accordingly? I read the articles through that lens and wanted to track who thought what.

Mandy and I decided to use a key with the main theorist from this week so that we could track all the principle concepts of literacy, as well as the authors of each concept. Doing so allowed us to represent literacy as portrayed in our readings and keep track of the authors. Thus we needed to identify the main categories of literacy and the subcategories within. This was surprisingly simple as the authors, in many cases, explicitly stated their stances. For example, Bizzell devotes a whole section to orality, alphabetic literacy, and cultural literacy as massive parts of literacy. Brandt wrote a lot about the situadedness of time in relation to literacy accumulation by looking at three different generations experiences of literacy acquisition. It seemed as if throughout the majority of the readings this week, the social aspect of literacy was represented in all authors. Working through each reading allowed us to schematize how literacy is represented throughout the prescribed readings.

I think Brandt illustrates the complexity and ever-changing nature of literacy best in the following statement, “The piling up and extending out of literacy and its technologies give a complex flavor even to elementary acts of reading and writing today. Contemporary literacy learners-across positions of age, gender, race, class, and language heritage-find themselves having to piece together reading and writing experiences from more and more spheres, creating new and hybrid forms of literacy where once there might have been fewer and more circumscribed forms” (pg. 651). If I could edit this statement, I would add an element of time. The time-period of an individual directly impacts the effects of age, race, gender, technology, etc. Brandt mentions.

Working from Brandt, we chose our large categories to be “Ideologies”, “Multiple Literacies”, and “Context Dependent”. We felt that from the readings, we could postulate three ideologies- literacy accumulation (directly from Brandt and indirectly from Bizzell), technological determinism (directly from Ohmann), and mass culture (directly from Ohmann and Richardson). What these ideologies mean might look different among the authors identified, but they give a starting place for discussion. Multiple literacies was the largest category in our literacy schema. All of the authors this week portrayed the multidimensionalism of literacy. Representing this accurately and sufficiently proved to be challenging, as some authors spoke of the same concept using different terminology (e.g. multiculturalism, authorship). A big “aha” moment came when conceptualizing the dependency of literacy on the context it is situated in. As mentioned before, the time-period has large impacts on the author and literacy accumulator. Within the category of “Context Dependent” we narrowed the sub categories to time, power and control, and social. Personally, I personally think these subcategories are all interrelated with one another.

Returning back to my question, Whose line is it anyway?, I can now use the schema to better understand that perhaps the answer comes from many voices. Perhaps it is the line of the acquirer, the society, the time period, the discipline, the teacher. Maybe, when one becomes literate it is the voice of many, as Bizzell writes “You can’t act alone, perhaps, but you can act with others with whom you make a common cause” (pg. 152)- whatever that cause may be. 

In addition to my critical blog post, I will share an instance that recently occurred with a teacher- somewhere between here and Japan- in order to illustrate how literacy is represented in some classrooms. As many of you know, the push for Common Core has teachers of all content areas (science, social studies, math) implementing "literacy practices" in their classrooms. The unfortunate part about this is, there is little professional development or defining of literacy in the content areas for many of these teachers. We know how complex this term is and we may know what this requires of students, but it has produced quite interesting results in the K-12 classroom. Some time I ago I visited a 25-year veteran educator teaches middle-school Science and is seen by colleagues as a exemplarily educator. While I was preparing to teach RED4335 (Literacy in Content Areas) a few semesters ago I wanted to understand how literacy practices were implemented in the Science classroom. Through email correspondence I asked this teacher if she wouldn’t mind sharing a lesson she used where literacy practices were evident in Science. Excitedly she gave me student work of a skit in which she required her students to write about a science experiment. The teacher told me this was the best one and she really felt that it required students to employ literacy practices. After analyzing the skit, I realized that there were very few Science concepts evident and therefore no content area literacy practices were used. Walking away from reading the skit, I could not tell if the student even knew what an experiment was. The skit was, however, a very cute skit. The teacher had commonly confused literacy practices with English-discipline practices (playwriting). This raised some very interesting questions about the nature of literacy. It seems as if, literacy is not simply the act of reading and writing. There is more. That is why I said in class on Tuesday, that we must look to the discipline to see what practices are in place and identify those as literacy practices in that content area.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-53.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57 (1995): 649-68.

Triangulating Literacy: Negotiation, Agency, and Technology

The schema that Erik and I constructed has many layers and nuances that will take a much more extended reflection to give justice to all the aspects, but for my blog post, I want to focus on the relationship between the negotiation of literacy practices and a person’s agency in our schema of literacy.

I want to begin with Brandt who discusses “accumulating literacy” and the “material and ideological surplus” that people in the 21^st century are now confronting in that accumulation and literacy; she writes,

The piling up and extending out of literacy and its technologies give a complex flavor even to elementary acts of reading and writing today. Contemporary literacy learners…find themselves having to piece together reading and writing experiences from more and more spheres, creating new hybrid forms of literacy where once there might have been fewer and more circumscribed. (emphasis mine, 651)

So, here I want to focus on two aspects that will begin my discussion negotiation and agency. First, her discussion of emerging technologies (particularly, we might assume, digital technologies) can connect us to Ohmann’s warning (if we might call it that) to pay attention to how technologies, such as the computer. And second, the idea I’ve emphasized which may get us to agency: the act of piecing together seems like the important point of negotiation. This may also connect us to Johnson-Eiola’s discussion of the composing process as assemblage of texts.

To the first point, Ohmann gives us a warning that some writing technologies (he discusses the computer) are commoditized by a corporation who attach practices to the technology that enforce a dominant ideology—a top-down model of building literacy practices; or what I would call the global writing the local (I’m getting this language from David Barton). In other words, when the global literacy practices—or the broadcasting of dominant ideals worthy of broadcasting—are emerging from the home via personal writing technologies, we cannot allow them to flatten our community literacy practices. Ohmann might say that the local should write the global—or, that the local should preserve its literacy practices alongside a dominant global literacy. I have two examples I want to discuss: first, in Brandt, I’m interested in how one of her interviewees was using the radio (I cite in length):

So to listen to those stories of “The Shadow” or “Orson Welles Theatre” or “Mercury Theatre.” God, you could get right in. I mean, you could picture this whole thing going on and it was done with words. In our neighborhood plays we would try to reconstruct that… Or if you got a little poem that your mother wants you to read in front of them, a dozen relatives, because they think it’s good and you want to show off. And you read this dumb thing and you realize how really limited you are compared to Orson Welles. You were always comparing yourself to Orson Welles (emphasis mine, 657)

Here, I want to raise the question over negotiation, agency, and technology. Here is an a example, very clearly, of how the global is writing the local: Mr. May, the interviewee, is describing how the radio brought several dominant literacy practices to the home via Orson Welles. But what’s important here is that instead of seeing the literacy practices as of a different kind, he thought of it as a difference in degree: that his literacy practices were limited when compared to Orson. May, in fact, tried to emulate these Orson-Wellian practices. And I’m sorry to say, May doesn’t seem to be an active agent in this “negotiation” (if we want to call it negotiation) because of his passive (and almost defeatist) surrender to those other literacy practices. If we look to the schema that Erik and I made, we may say that the large arrow of dominant practices takes complete precedence over the smaller arrows derived from his home-grown practices. The top-down takes precedence over the bottom-up; the global is writing his local.

The second example is not from our readings so I’ll be brief. In Shane Borrowman’s On the Blunt Edge, Shawn Fullmer writes in his chapter "'The Next Takes the Machine': Typewriter Technology and the Transformation of Teaching” about how the personal typewriter—the kind that goes into the home—was embraced by formalists as standardizing users (students, citizens, etc) into the “proper” form. Initially, I would be under the assumption that the typewriter, one that enters the home, would offer users more agency because the home literacy practices would take precedence (at least be equal to) the practices attached to it. But from the formalist perspective (according to Fullmer), if students are socialized to use the typewriter in the way that aligns itself with a formalist ideology, then their practices will invade their home life.

I would argue that a successful negotiation happens when a person embodies agency by acknowledging and recognizing that they are negotiating between dominant and vernacular practices: that there are different literacy practices by kind rather than by degree. Mr. May, if given a typewriter and socialized with a formalist ideology, might fully surrender to those values—to which I would say, that doesn’t look like negotiation to me. (Bizzell discusses this question of negotiation in teacher-student relationships).

This discussion then connects us to my last point: when confronted with a surplus of different kinds of literacy practices, how do we sift through and choose which ones to attach ourselves to (or align ourselves with)?  In class, we discussed how students are conscious of this piecing together of literacy practices—it may be naïve to think otherwise. However, I would disagree: if a person is socialized to believe that the dominant is the ultimate and proper kind of literacy, then that person is not so much piecing together literacy practices themselves, but mirroring the dominant.  Richardson would call this miseducation—“a form of training or socialization designed for the uplift of the dominant society, which inadvertently works to the demise of the oppressed people in the society” (98). In other words, I’m not convinced that a person—such as a student—automatically has agency simply because they’ve made a choice—that choice may not be a choice at all, but a trained response. Per Burke (qua Enoch), critical reflection allows us to bring visible those aspects of our literacy practices and language that often operate under our radar, but dangerously impact our lives.

We can’t enter a classroom with the assumption that students automatically have agency—we, instructors, may need to prompt our students to see literacies as being different in kinds rather than degrees. In my experiences, students are more willing to sacrifice a bottom-up model of building literacy practices, but through critical reflection (Burke) we might get them to see it differently.

Who I mention (Thanks to Julianna who I copy-and-pasted from):

Bizzell, Patricia. “Arguing about Literacy.” College English 50.2 (1988): 141-153.

Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-667.

Enoch, Jessica. "Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke's Pedagogy of Critical Reflection." CCC 56.2 (2004): 272-296.

Fullmer, Shawn. “The Next Takes the Machine”: Typewriter Technology and the Transformation of Teaching” On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition's History and Pedagogy. Ed. Shane Borrowman. Anderson, S.C.: Parlor Press. 2012. Print.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition.” Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sidler, Michelle, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007. 454-468.

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English 47.7 (1985): 675 688.

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